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Jonathan Spector

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This Much I Know (PlayPenn, 2020)

 

Jonathan Spector is a playwright based in Oakland, California. His plays include Eureka Day (NY Times “Critics’ Pick”, Glickman Award, BATCC Award, TBA Award, Rella Lossy Award), Good. Better. Best. Bested., In From The Cold, and Siesta Key. His work has been produced and developed with Colt Coeur, Roundabout Theatre Company, South Coast Rep, Aurora Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Mosaic Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Custom Made Theater, Mugwumpin, SF Playhouse, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Crowded Fire, and Just Theater, where he is Co-Artistic Director. Jonathan has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Resident Playwright at Playwrights Foundation, and is a recipient of South Coast Rep’s Elizabeth George Commission.

Will Snider

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Strange Men (PlayPenn, 2019)

 

Will Snider’s play How to Use a Knife received a Rolling World Premiere through National New Play Network, won the Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play, and was a finalist for a PEN Center USA Literary Award. Other plays include Death of a Driver (Urban Stages, NYC) and The Big Man (EST’s 35th Marathon of One-Act Plays). He earned a BA in History from Columbia with a specialization in post-colonial East African political history and spent three years working in agricultural microfinance in Kenya and Ethiopia before earning an MFA in Playwriting from UCSD.

 

Silva Semerciyan

Silva Semerciyan

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Another Man’s Son (PlayPenn, 2008)

Silva Semerciyan is an American playwright permanently settled in the UK. She won the William Saroyan Prize for Playwriting for her first full-length play, Another Man’s Son, which was subsequently developed under commission to the National Theatre. Her other plays include The Light Burns Blue (Tonic Theatre, 2015), I and the Village (Theatre503, 2015), The Window (Bristol Old Vic, 2014), The Tinderbox (Bristol Old Vic, 2014), Gather Ye Rosebuds(Theatre503, 2013) and Flashes (Young Vic, 2012). Her work has also been presented in readings and short-run productions by the National Theatre Studio, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Nightingale Theatre, Adrienne Theatre, LA Theatre Company and Golden Thread Productions.

I and the Village was shortlisted for the Bruntwood Prize in 2011, and Gather Ye Rosebuds won Best New Play at the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2013. Her radio play Varanasi was shortlisted for a BBC Audio Drama Award. She has been a BBC Fellow at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, a member of the Royal Court’s Studio Writers’ Group, and a writer on attachment at the National Theatre Studio. She holds an MPhil (B) in Playwriting from the University of Birmingham.

 

Lydia Stryk

Lydia Stryk

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On Clarion (PlayPenn, 2005)

Lydia Stryk was born in DeKalb, Illinois, birthplace of barbed wire and flying ears of corn. She grew up between DeKalb and London, England, and as a child also lived in Japan where she studied Kabuki and performed on the stage, and in Iran. After high school, she trained to be an actress at the Drama Centre, London–a career she pursued in New York for exactly one year before going back to school to study history, education and later, journalism. She has a BA in History from Hunter College, an MA in Journalism from NYU and a Ph.D. in Theatre from the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. Her dissertation, “Acting Hysteria: An Analysis of the Actress and her Part” was in part an attempt to understand why her own short-lived experience acting the woman’s part on stage felt pathological. It was while interning at the weekly journal, The Nation, that she wrote a first play, coming full circle back to the theatre, but this time as a writer — inspired by the feminist idea circulating at the time that women might have other stories to tell and other ways of telling them. She is the author of over a dozen full-length plays and a few short ones, including Monte Carlo, The House of Lily, The Glamour House, American Tet, An Accident and Lady Lay which have been produced around the United States and also in Germany and Canada. US productions include those at Denver Center Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Victory Gardens, HB Studios, The Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Magic Theatre and 7 Stages. In Germany her work has been produced at Schauspiel Essen, Theaterhaus Stuttgart and the English Theater Berlin where she is an artistic associate. The House of Lily has been produced in repertory in its third German production, at Hoftheater Dresden. Scenes and monologues have been anthologized in collections by Heinemann, Applause and Smith and Kraus. Her play, American Tet, appears in “Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays” from Northwestern University Press. The End of Civilization as we Know It appears in the anthology, “Here Come the Brides!” from Seal Press. Individual plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing and Dramatists Play Service and translated into German by Per Lauke Verlag, Hamburg. She has been commissioned by Pittsburgh Public Theatre and Geva Theatre, Rochester and is the recipient of a Berrilla Kerr Playwright Award and the 2010 Rella Lossy Playwriting Award. She lives between Berlin and New York teaching and editing and struggling with the art of growing things in her Berlin allotment garden

 

Peter Gil Sheridan

Peter Gil-Sheridan

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Cockfight (PlayPenn, 2013)

Peter Gil-Sheridan was recently in residence at San Juan College in Farmington, NM writing a new play called Courtney and Caroline, a piece written with Native and non-Native community members about religious and cultural tradition in the area. His play Ritu Comes Home, originally commissioned by InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia was selected as part of their 20/20 Commission program had its world premiere there. Other plays include Cockfight written at the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and further developed by PlayPenn under the direction of Anna Brenner and What May Fall, commissioned by the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and performed there. Topsy Turvy Mouse was produced by the Cherry Lane and Borderlands Theatre in Tucson and was the winner of The Smith Prize awarded by the National New Play Network for outstanding political work. Other work developed by the Lark’s Playground, New York Theatre Workshop, Queens Theatre in the Park. Residencies include the Jerome Fellowship in Minneapolis, The Sundance Institute, The Millay Colony, The Ucross Foundation, Tofte Lake and A Theatre Group in Silverton, CO. Peter has also been a member of I73, Page 73’s weekly writing group in New York. He’s performed his first solo piece People Tell Me Things at several venues across the U.S. including Ars Nova’s ANTFest, Identity, Inc. in Farmington, NM, at Ucross in Wyoming and on Martha’s Vineyard. Peter joins the faculty at IU after ten years of teaching at Fordham University in New York and as a LEAP teaching artist in New York City Public Schools.

 

Jen Silverman

Jen Silverman

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Wild Blue (PlayPenn, 2014)

Jen Silverman is a New York-based playwright and writer. Born in the U.S., she was raised across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Her theatre work includes The Moors (Yale Repertory Theatre premiere, off-Broadway with The Playwrights Realm, Susan Smith Blackburn finalist); The Roommate (Actor’s Theatre of Louisville world premiere, produced widely across the U.S. including productions at South Coast Rep and Williamstown Theatre Festival, Steppenwolf); Phoebe In Winter (Off-off Broadway with Clubbed Thumb); The Dangerous House of Pretty Mbane (InterAct Theatre: Barrymore Award, Steinberg Award citation); Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth premiere, The Theater @ Boston Court, upcoming at the Southwark Playhouse in London); and All The Roads Home (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park premiere). Jen is a member of New Dramatists, a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, an affiliated artist with SPACE on Ryder Farm, and has developed work with the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, New York Theatre Workshop, The Ground Floor Residency at Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court in London among other places. She’s a two-time MacDowell fellow, recipient of an NYFA grant, the Helen Merrill Award, an LMCC Work-Space residency, the Yale Drama Series Award and the 2016-2017 Playwrights of New York (PoNY) Fellowship via the Lark. Jen also writes in other media. She has a two-book deal with Random House for a collection of stories (The Island Dwellers, May 2018) and a novel, and is developing an original television project with Working Title. Education: Brown, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Juilliard. www.jensilverman.com

Emily Schwend Headshot

Emily Schwend

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Behind the Motel (PlayPenn, 2014)

Emily Schwend’s plays include Utility (The Amoralists, Yale Drama Series Award, IT Award for Outstanding Premiere Production of a Play, upcoming production at Orange Tree Theatre in London), The Other Thing (Second Stage Theatre Uptown), Take Me Back (Walkerspace), SOUTH OF SETTLING (Steppenwolf’s Next Up Rep), and SPLINTERS (CUDC Source Festival). She was a 2016-2017 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University and the inaugural 2014 Tow Foundation playwright-in-residence at Second Stage Theatre. Her work has been developed at The New Group, Roundabout Theatre Company, ACT Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, Partial Comfort Productions, Ars Nova, the Alliance Theatre, PlayPenn, and the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, among others. She is a frequent contributor to Christine Jones’s Theatre for One booth. She is a recipient of a Bogliasco Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, the ACT New Play Award, the David Calicchio Emerging American Playwrights Prize, the Lecomte du Nouy Prize, and the Heideman Prize. Her work has been commissioned by SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston, the Ensemble Studio Theatre through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Old Vic in London. She is a proud alumna of the playwriting programs at Juilliard and Tisch.

Ellen Struve

Ellen Struve

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Prince Max’s Trewly Awful Trip to the Desolat Interior (PlayPenn, 2015)

Ellen Struve is an Omaha-based playwright. Her play Prince Max’s Trewly Awful Trip to the Desolat Interior was selected for the 2015 PlayPenn Playwrights’ Conference, presented at Great Plains Theatre Conference PlayFest at Joslyn Art Museum and had its premiere in 2017 at Red Theatre in Chicago, IL. Recommended Reading for Girls was an O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semi-finalist. She is a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, WhyArts resident artist and Bemis Center for the Arts community artist. She serves on the board of Shelterbelt Theater. In 2017 she will be Creighton University’s first ever playwright-in-residence, developing The Dairy Maid-Right and The Octopus Lady and co-teaching Theatre for Social Justice. She has degrees from University of Iowa and School of the Art Institute of Chicago.